Encouraging Multicultural Leadership

Charles Montgomery

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Encouraging Multicultural Leadership

Charles Montgomery

Addressing how churches in the movement can encourage diversity in leadership, both spiritually and practically.

Well I think that first of all we have to embrace some dependence, because the reality is that we can’t do this by ourselves, the reality is that like is known by like and we have a tendency to be able to connect with people that are in our particular circles, and so to be able to step out of that and be able to move into multicultural churches you have to embrace dependence upon the Holy Spirit for you to do that.

I think we also have to take some intentional steps as well. One of the things that I’ve done in churches that I’ve had a chance to participate with in multicultural leadership, is we look specifically at our staging and we begin to say “well do we have people on the stage that are actually balanced in terms of cultures” but then at the same time what we really want to do is we want to make sure that people who we actually are targeting in our community come up and they see themselves physically there on the stage, and so we begin to create that connection.

I think that you also have to develop cross cultural relationships and so you have to be able to step out into other churches and churches that have other ethnicities and begin to learn from them and begin to take a posture of learning to say that I’m very serious about developing a relationship with you so that you can begin to do things like pulpit exchanges so that you can get your congregation more so acclimated to the idea of having people who may not necessarily look like you in that congregation there and actually worshipping the God of our salvation.

And then I think you have to also be able to develop a cross-cultural confidence which means you have to be able to look at and read and research other periodicals, other resources of other cultures and recognising that no-one has a corner on the Holy Spirit but the Holy Spirit manifests himself in very different ways in various cultures, and when you begin to do those things and begin to take those intentional steps I believe it creates a context for churches who are very serious about multicultural ministry to be able to move in those spaces

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